| Summary: | 碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 金融碩士在職專班 === 102 === This thesis studies how macroeconomic and demographic variables affect life insurance demand across countries. From Swiss Re Sigma and World Bank’s database, a panel with annual data of four economies, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the US in 1991-2012 is collected. In the dataset, the demand for life insurance is measured by life insurance penetration or life insurance density. Macroeconomic variables are GDP per capita, gross saving rate and inflation rate. Demographic variables include life expectancy, the young dependency ratio and the old dependency ratio. The linear panel regression model with fixed effects is used for analysis. By adding the squared term of GDP per capita in the regression of life insurance density, the results show that there exists a nonlinear relationship between GDP per capita and life insurance density. The life insurance density increases with GDP per capita, but with a decreasing rate. This phenomenon is consistent with the S-curve relation in the literature. Except GDP per capita, all other variables have about the same effects on life insurance penetration and life insurance density. The variables, gross saving rate and the old dependency ratio have significantly positive effects on the demand for life insurance, while the rest variables have significantly negative impacts. The positive effects imply that the major components of life insurance products might be endowment policy, annuity and long-term care insurance as old-age society is coming. By the regression with only Taiwan’s data, gross saving rate has a relatively large impact. This indicates life insurance products are the major long-term saving instruments in Taiwan.
Keywords: life insurance penetration, life insurance density, gross saving rate, linear panel model
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